by Paul R. Spitzzeri
With a full page of a special section on Black Los Angeles in the 12 February 1909 issue of the Los Angeles Times devoted to African-American women, contributor Kate Bradley Stovall, a leader in her community, detailed the activities of many of her contemporaries in the arts, business and religion, as we have noted in previous parts of this post.
In her discussion of religion, she mentioned the formation, at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, in early November 1904 of the Sojourner Truth Industrial Club, which “was organized for the definite purpose of establishing a Working Girls’ Home.” To date, there were $600 saved and the Club was “planning the erection of a modern, model home” because “every year brings into the city a large number of girls who must support themselves.” The organization incorporated in May 1907 and slowly raised funds for its project.
This concept mirrored the experiences of white women, but these latter had the benefit of a very large and expensive working girls’ home, the establishment of which was led by copper baron Willian Andrews Clark. With Black women in the Club raising what they could at modest levels because of the general financial condition of their community, their goal was essentially the same and Stovall added,
The Sojourner Truth [Industrial] Club feels that the girls of good character and temperate habits should have a place to call home, even after they have found work. The efficient president, Mrs. J.M. Scott, has formulated many plans for the completion of the “miles of pennies,” to be used in the erection of the home. The mile of pennies is to be computed at 20 cents per foot, and when complete will place in the treasury $1000 to being the purchase of their home site.
The Club persevered and showed great resilience in fundraising to the point in which by early 1912, a site was acquired on the north side of Adams Boulevard just east of Central Avenue, an area in which the African-American community of the Angel City was expanding with its growth from the central downtown core of earlier years.
A Mission Revival design was incorporated for the two-story edifice, with the lot and structure costing about $6,000, of which half was paid up when the home, located at 1119 E. Adams Boulevard, was opened in May 1913. Accommodations for 20 women were provided, with a weekly charge of $1.50 to them for the room, while breakfast and dinner were to cost residents 20 and 25 cents, respectively, for a monthly expense of under $13. The institution was later used for college and trade school students and was open as late as 1976. The structure, however, still stands and has lately been used as a Latino church.
Another organization discussed by Stovall was the Woman’s Progressive Club, about a half-dozen years old, with an affiliation with the National Federation of Negro Woman’s Clubs. It was added that, for Club members:
They are working for mutual improvement, especially along literary lines. They have made a study of the life and works of Shakespeare, [Elizabeth Barrett] Browning and several other writers. They are now studying the history of the dark races and the code [laws?] of California.
Elizabeth Warner, it was pointed out, was the California president of the aforementioned national club federation and conducted meetings and traveled a good deal “in the interest of club and fraternal work in this city.” A Pasadena woman, Corina Bush Hicks (1876-1968), was mentioned by Stovall as being “one of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers that toured England, and was president of the Woman’s Literary and Industrial Club which was “planning for the erection of a reading room for the Negro youth of California.” Hicks was later president of the state federation.
Also featured was Estelle Everett, who attended a Colorado dramatic school and earned a gold medal for her work there and was president of the Young Ladies’ Dramatic Club, with Stovall remarking,
They are striving to cultivate a desire for pure thought-inspiring literature. They meet and entertain worthy strangers, and give dramas for the benefit of charitable clubs.
Another key figure in the organization was director Maud Ellworth Saunders, said to have been, while in St. Louis, an understudy to the well-known Black actor Henrietta Vinton Davis, and who was also skilled in embroidery and other sewing arts.
The heading of “A NEGRO POETESS” was followed by the comment that “we have in our city a negro woman poetess who was the personal friend of Paul Laurence Dunbar” and among whose prized possessions was a letter from him when she wrote a poem called “Lines to Dunbar.” Eva Carter Buckner (1861 or 1864-1946) was born in Iowa and lived there and in Colorado and began her work in poetry at Colorado Springs, while also developing her talent as a composer of songs.
Stovall observed that Buckner contributed to an anthology, Gems of Poesy, and “has written for many eastern magazines and papers,” while also holding a copyright for her song, “The City of Sunshine” and writing short stories, to boot. Some lines from Buckner’s tribute to the famed poet John Greenleaf Whittier, for whom the Los Angeles County city is named, were reproduced in the article.
Next among the Angel City’s African-American women whom Stovall recognized was Katherine J. Barr (1872-1931), widow of Dr. Elmer E. Barr with the couple meeting in Chicago, where he was a well-known physician and she, a Montgomery, Alabama native and graduate of the Tuskegee Institute, received her training as a nurse.
After her husband’s death, Barr, the first Black trained nurse in Los Angeles, raised her son and supported her mother while “she is accumulating an extensive library, composed of volumes written by and about the members of her own race.” She was later secretary of the local Urban League chapter and continued when it became part of the Community Chest and was a founder of the Woman’s Day Nursery.
Also highlighted was Jessie Terry Addison (1880-1946), a native of Texas who was trained as a nurse in Washington, D.C. and who was said to be “highly respected in her profession by the leading physicians in the city.” Though she did not work after marriage and bearing four children, she returned to the field after her husband’s death and was an officer with the Colored Nurses’ Association.
Stovall then wrote generally that,
While the women of Los Angeles and vicinity have done a great deal toward their own advancement and the uplifting of their race in general, future years will show a marked improvement in all activities of life. To this city, from every section of the United States, have come wives and mothers, highly educated and well equipped for their calling. The children of these women are being reared in an environment of intellectuality.
Alice Watkins Garrott, wife of dentist Alva C., and who was a temperance worker following her education at Talladega College in Alabama and a former teacher “is a striking example of noble motherhood. Minnie Mitchell Wickliffe, whose husband Gustavus was a prominent lawyer and previously a subject of a post on this blog, formerly taught English literature and Latin at a St. Louis high school.
Stovall continued that,
The mothers of Los Angeles are really studying their children, subscribing for and reading magazines of special interest to them. These mothers are striving to give to the world men and women who shall be worthy and competent. They fully realize that upon them rests the hope of a more successful future for their race.
Lucie Ann Stanton Sessions (1831-1910) was born in Cleveland and after her father died when she was two years old, her mother Margaret remarried. When the 1850 census was taken in mid-August in her hometown, Lucie was enumerated, at age 18, with her mother, stepfather and four stepbrothers and sisters, while no occupation was mentioned for her.
Yet, just a couple of months before, she completed a remarkable achievement, as related by Stovall:
Mrs. Sessions of Los Angeles holds the first [college] diploma received by a negro woman in America. Mrs. Sessions eyes grew dim with tears as she told of being driven from every public school in Toledo on account of her color, and of her struggles to please at each succeeding school. Then, forcing a smile, she said, “But never, my dear, did a teacher send me home; it was only the visitors that did not know me that objected to my presence.” When she returned, heartbroken, from the last school in the city, her mother assured her that she should have an education. With the assistance of friends, Mrs. Sessions was finally taken into Oberlin College on trial, as she was really too young to be admitted. Her record was such that she readily gained permission to continue her studies.
After her 1850 graduation, Sessions went to the South to teach, while she also called for the abolition of slavery, including through the Cleveland newspaper of her first husband, the Rev. William Howard Day. The couple relocated to Canada to teach fugitive slaves who fled via the Underground Railroad from the United States and had a daughter, Florence, though, William Day left for England and then wanted a divorce.
Following the Civil War, the Cleveland Freedmen’s Association sponsored her to teach in Georgia and Mississippi as the South entered Reconstruction and she met her second husband, Levi Sessions, in that latter state. The couple and her daughter, who also became a teacher at a Southern college and then public schools at Chattanooga, migrated to Tennessee and then, in February 1904, settled in Los Angeles. In February 1910, Sessions died at age 78 and was followed by her daughter the next year.
Julia Waldron Stacker, a widow, hailed from New York and was educated in Philadelphia and Stovall reported that she “was the second negro woman to receive a certificate of graduation as a kindergarten teacher,” following this with 15 years of instruction in Florida, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Formerly a copyist in the office of city tax collector, Ben E. Ward, and then a dressmaker, Stacker “organized a Book Lovers’ Club on the Furlong tract,” this an area in south Los Angeles in which Black people could buy property unlike most other places in the city, for the negro youth. Stacker died in December 1913 at age 59.
Lula (sometimes Lulu) Josephine Holden Adams (1879-1952), born in Texas, moved with her family in the 1880s to Fruitland, now in the industrial city of Vernon and had “the unique honor of being the only negro to graduate from the Los Angeles School of Art and Design,” completing her studies in 1901. Stovall observed that Adams, then residing in Santa Barbara, “is the leading negro artist of the Pacific Coast” and “has received several letters of encouragement from Tanner, the world-famous negro artist.” This was Henry Ossawa Tanner, a native of Pittsburgh who worked in France from the early 1890s until his death in 1931.
Adams specialized in floral still lifes, winning a gold medal in 1917 in an exhibition by the All-American League of California at Exposition Park, and appears to have continued with her painting, as well as metaphysical studies, until her death, including the operation of a studio in the Angel City neighborhood of Venice. Her only child, Elizabeth, who was three days old when Stovall’s article was published, became a writer of at least five books and whose autobiography, Dark Symphony (1942), was popular among her fellow Roman Catholics.
After recording that there were more than 50 Black female high school students and between 25 and 50 held diplomas, Stovall noted that Grace Harris was the second African-American woman to graduate from the state Normal School for teacher education, while Effie Webb was attending that institution. Mamie Cunningham, a Los Angeles High graduate, was, to date, a post office employee for a half-dozen years.
Under the heading of “A Genuine Negro,” was the featuring of Diana Bralah McNeil (1888-1971), a native of Liberia, founded in 1820s with American slaves repatriated there, but she was a descendant, Stovall noted, of native-born Africans. At the age of three, McNeil was entrusted to a Methodist missionary by that surname with the proviso that she “was to be thoroughly educated and sent back to her people for their enlightenment.”
She attended schools in Pennsylvania and then completed high school in Monrovia, in the San Gabriel Valley and which happened to share the same name as Liberia’s capital (they were not named for the same people—the former was for town founder, William Monroe and the latter for President James Monroe).
In June, McNeil was to graduate from the University of Southern California, Methodist-affiliated until about this time, whose president, George F. Bovard, called her “a young lady of exceptional Christian character, taking an active part in all Christian work in the institution.” Stovall concluded her article by praising McNeil for her appearance, her love of music and for the realization of “the extreme possibilities of development of an African girl when given a ‘fighting chance,” while telling Times readers:
The negro race is in America to stay. No race can rise higher than its women. Educate the negro, as a whole, but, above all, educate the negro mother, and the race problem, if a problem it is, will be forever solved.
McNeil not only received her bachelor’s degree from USC in 1909, but completed a one-year graduate program there, writing a thesis on Liberia’s experiment with republican government. She went back to her native country and taught English at the College of West Africa, though problems with her health induced her to return to America. She taught at a college at Little Rock, Arkansas, where she married Baptist minister, the Rev. Cato H. Pierson and then taught at Wiley College, a Historically Black College, in Marshall, Texas, where he was dean of male students. The couple had a daughter, Clarice, who became a college professor at Texas Southern University.
Kate Bradley Stovall’s essay is valuable for understanding the vital role that Black women played in their community in early 20th century Los Angeles. Sadly, she died just five years later in 1914, the day after her 30th birthday, and one wonders what further impacts she would have had on the Angel City’s African-American community had she lived.
We’ll return tomorrow with a look at the last page of this special section concerning “The Educational Progress of the Negro,” so check back in for that.